[LAU] PianoBooster version 0.5.0 has just been released

[Louis B.]

Hi All,

Thanks for all your comments.

I would be interested to hear if anybody has got Piano Booster working
OK, especially those of you who have tried playing along with a piano
Keyboard. (Has any body tried the Easy Play Beethoven? Did you manage
to make the accuracy bar go blue?)

<q> Any plans for JACK audio and JACK midi support? </q>

Not at the moment my highest priority is improving the latency. To use
PianoBooster you have to shut everything down including your search
for the next highest prime number!! By the way how do find the latency
on your setup? Piano Booster cannot buffer any Midi Events as it
responds in real time to what you are playing.

<q> 1. Choose track or tracks to play. That now enables any midi file
and instruments besides the piano. Note that certain instruments use
different staves than the two piano cleffs so a full implementation is
more difficult. Minimally, let my choose the two tracks for piano
staves since this is the focus of the program.</q>

You can already choose _any_ track to play and also it should work
with _any_ MIDI file. I am thinking of automatically adding av8 marks
so that if it goes too high or too low for the dual piano clefs it
will be displayed an octave higher or lower with the av8 mark. This
should be particular good for the bass part which are often great to
play along to. It automatically will split the right an left parts of
a single track at middle C. Currently to get it to uses two tracks one
for left hand and the other for the right hand you need rewrite the
MIDI file to uses MIDI channels 3 + 4 (this is a convention for MIDI
piano accompaniment files) and set both these instruments to the use
GM Grand Piano patch.

<q>2. Option to display more of the score (limited by screen real
estate but the view in the screen shot seems very large. Zoom in/out? </q>

The view of the score score is deliberately restricted to reduce the
CPU usage to help with the latency on slow machines (until the real
time hooks have been added to the code). However as the screen is
drawn using OpenGl then this should in principle be easy to add. As is
zooming in and out. But when sight reading music you only need to see
one or possibly two bars ahead.

Thanks

L o u i s


On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 11:40 PM, Louis B. <louisjbarman at googlemail.com> wrote:
> PianoBooster version 0.5.0 has just been released, this is the first
> ever release of PianoBooster.
>
> If you dabble in music and have a Midi Piano keyboard lying around
> then give PianoBooster a go as it actually makes sight reading music
> fun!!!!!
>
> To see what it is all about take a look at the screen shot:
>
>   http://pianobooster.sourceforge.net/images/LinuxScreenShot.png
>
>
> First choose a MIDI file (the Easy Play Beethoven is a good one -- see
> the download page for where this can be found) then select which part
> that you want to play along with (e.g. the piano part or the strings
> part etc). Then select the "left" hand or the "right" hand or if you
> are feeling really brave choose "both hands" and try to play along.
> The "Follow You" mode make it really easy to sight read the scrolling
> notes as the whole accompaniment will stop and wait for you to find
> and play the right notes.
>
> The accuracy bar monitors how well you are playing. If you are skilled
> enough the accuracy bar will go right to the end and then turn blue.
> But every time you are too slow or playing out of time, then the
> accuracy bar slips back a bit.
>
> You can watch a video of it in action on YouTube:
>
>   http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7YaDllVreuM
>
> Piano Booster 0.5.0 is released under the GPL and is available at
> SourceForge on this page:
>
>   http://pianobooster.sourceforge.net/download.html
>
>
> L o u i s   B a r m a n
>